Transcend, Kingston, Crucial, Corsair are considered to be the top brands for RAM. But Hynix is cheaper and IMO very good too. I must have bought and installed hundreds of Hynix RAM sticks over the past several years, out of which one 128MB unit installed 2 1/2 years ago failed recently, and it's the only failure I've had so far.
PATA HDDs are easily available and are cheaper than SATA drives. At the moment, the advantage of SATA is mainly theoretical. You won't see any significant improvement in performance.
I use only Seagate HDDs. They are quiet, come with a 5-year warranty, and I've had only one failure out of those I installed myself. I've seen several Samsung drives fail. I've never used Maxtor drives but I've seen numerous reports of early failure of Maxtor drives.
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